unlearn the ways of your mad, glass world
by all these ghost towns
Summary: If time were slotted into something tangible, Sif would think – years later; centuries upon centuries later – it took too long for the shadows to leave the whites of his eyes. But then again, Loki always did conceal the darkest parts of things in the lightest parts of himself.


xvii.

If time were slotted into something tangible, Sif would think – years later; centuries upon centuries later – it took too long for the shadows to leave the whites of his eyes.

But then again, Loki always did conceal the darkest parts of things in the lightest parts of himself.

iv.

In the disjointed limbo after Loki's fall – Loki's _jump_, she reminds herself time and again till the words ring hollow and lose their truths – Sif doesn't recognize much in detail; doesn't remember much at all, to be honest. The only thing she can recall with clear, unadulterated certainty is the color of the inside of her eyelids, which isn't really a color at all. More of a state of being: wet and dark and shielding her from unremembered things she wishes with every fiber of her being she could actually forget.

In the aftermath, in those weighted days _After_, every Asgardian treats her with velvet-tipped words that make her think of long throats and slick words. The Warriors Three tread a wide breadth around Sif and her anger, around Thor and his grief, and their sentences are battened with armor.

Sif wants to laugh because they all _do_; they all laugh and so she does too, like there's humor in some corner of this. But that idea makes the backsides of her teeth taste bitter and her palms ache with an emptiness she can't quite name.

She feels a belated sense of indignation, and it's sour on her tongue. For all her warrior's skills, for all her praised sight – eyes razor sharp and well honed – she had failed to see something that must have been building for centuries. She had missed things; she won't ever let herself fall prey to missing _him_, this man who was once her friend: the small boy with slow smiles and quick feet.

v.

When they bring Loki home, Sif girds herself. There is a fight lurking behind all her misguided curiosity, tucked strong-kneed and waiting in her ill-begotten sorrow: an unwanted emotion that she won't value with a name.

She stands forward of the ranks of people flanking the steps of the palace, and she watches this morbid procession with steel in her eyes.

Loki stands high but hollowed out, all the weight of his pride not entirely enough. There's metal bound around his fine-boned wrists, and metal encasing his mouth, an ore-tinted homage to what was once golden thread. Thor has his hand upon Loki's shoulder, and that too, Loki treats as something meant to imprison. Sif breathes in and looks upon a stranger, the breath she expels is heavy upon her lip.

_Murderer_, she thinks; has thought over and over, but the word is wide-backed and hard to swallow. _Traitor_, she whispers continuously into the wick of her mind.

The green of Loki's gaze – so very sharp a green – is feral, but his brow is smooth, and the nearness of him as he loses distance between she and the Warriors Three, heats the metal in her blood. Sif tightens her fingers around the sword at her hip to match the tightening of her jaw, but his eyes, this betrayer in a prince's skin, never once stray toward them, toward her.

It's a relief, she tells herself.

But as she watches his long lashes catch the golden hues of the city: his own, the one whose people he'd see perish, she tastes copper in her mouth.

There's a shiver of muscle above one of Loki's sharp cheekbones as they ascend the steps, and it pinches in a corner of his wide, wide eyes that are trained ever straight ahead. There's flight in his gaze, Sif notes, a constant appraisal of an escape from the failures of all his vaunted plans. He blinks quickly, with intent, and Sif recognizes nothing in him; he's an animal wounded, tall-shouldered at its death's hour.

She swallows the blood off the split skin of her tongue and drops her eyes to the ground.

vi.

Sif doesn't even near the cell they have Loki in for almost the length of time it takes Thor to see to his brother's release.

Before he's let back into Asgard, able to haunt the shadowed places he's favored in the past, Sif dreams of blackened eyes and the empty stomach that accompanies a never-ending drop.

It's not the first she's wondered of his fall – his _jump_ – and it plagues her until it overshadows the hatred in her lungs. So she tucks a dagger into the strap of leather at her shoulder, and one into waistband of her trousers, and sets her shoulders as she would before battle.

In the dark hall leading to Loki's cell she finds Thor, pressed heavily against the damp wall. He's far enough from the cell that she doubts even Loki, with his cunning sight, can see him, so she stops in her path and eyes her friend.

Thor's quieter now, a sadness pulling on the proud line of his brow. She wishes for all her abilities she could give him one word to ease the heaviness of his shoulders, but she's never been a crafter of words, and the one who claims that title is the reason for Thor's drooping countenance.

"Sif." Thor says as a way of greeting, his voice lowered, confirming her belief that his presence here is unannounced.

"I did not expect you." He continues, stepping toward her and laying a hand on her shoulder.

Sif can't think how to explain her need to seek out Loki in a way that doesn't make her feel out of place, so she just lays a hand over his instead.

"It is nothing of trouble." She stops and tugs in a breath to pad the lie she forces through her teeth. "He is my friend, too." It's said with a quiet conviction meant to soothe the sting of falsity, but when Thor smiles she finds it feels true in her mouth.

Thor's smile fades quickly.

"He still won't speak." He says, something heavy lacing his words.

"Then I shall make him." She says with a flippant smile on her mouth.

Thor laughs softly and it lessens the band around her chest.

"You know as well as I that my brother does not do what he doesn't want to."

She does know, and all of what Loki had accomplished during his short stint on Midgard is poisoned with his intent. Sif finds it hard to comprehend the outcome of his agenda; she almost fears what his wishes may bring.

But fear has no standing here, and she is brave, so she turns back and steps toward Loki's cell and her breath sticks to her teeth.

Sprawled across every inch of wall in the wet confines of his cell, drafted in an elegant hand born only from one invested in his work, are rows upon rows of script in a language Sif doesn't know; one that she'll never know.

She lets her eyes trace the path of the strange wording and forces herself to swallow the pressure sticking her tongue to her throat.

"He writes more than he sleeps." Thor's voice is hushed in a morose reverence over her shoulder. "He doesn't eat half enough, he refuses to talk; he just _writes_."

The runes spark on some of the edges of the words, and the magic he'd expelled in composing them flashes defiantly against the cell's supposed containment of his art.

Sif finds she wants to know the things these arcs and lines mean, but she also thinks she'd rather not know his subversive plans. Not yet, not when it had taken her months to find it in herself to seek answers to an event long past.

She presses on the metal of her blade and looks in on the sight presented her with awe in her gaze.

Loki's back is turned toward them, his shoulders drawn in toward his chest. The long black of his hair curls up at his nape, and there are languid movements of his arms, but he doesn't turn. She takes another step toward him, but Thor's hand once again upon her shoulder stops her in her advance.

"Let us leave him tonight." He says, almost beseechingly. "He believes me gone, and I've already exhausted his good will enough for the both of us. We can turn back now, with Loki unaware, and you may do as you please in getting him to speak tomorrow."

There's a glint in Thor's eye for the humor at the tail end of his statement, but Sif doesn't fail to notice the selfless intention in his words. She feels her heart swell with affection and pride. He has come so far, yet remains so much of her closest friend.

She nods and they are about to depart the holding chambers when a flash of green startles and stalls their movement.

Sif's hand is tight on the dagger at her hip, and she tightens it further yet when she sees what Loki's spelled into their view.

On the wall, squat and fat in the center of a fading verdant glare, sits a beetle.

Thor cannot contain his befuddled delight at such an unusual interloper, and he laughs as he leans in closer to get a better look at the strange changing green of the beetle's body.

"Unaware indeed." Sif says with a venom she doesn't want to feel, doesn't mean to feel, and brushes roughly past Thor toward the staircase.

Thor entirely gives up his quietude, and he calls after her loudly in his confusion.

She lets the sound of his voice as it ricochets off the walls wash away the tightness in her gut.

ii.

A few weeks after her initial introduction to the princes, Loki slinks up on Sif in a deserted hallway of the palace, as she's on her way to her rooms.

"I might have killed you, you know." Sif says viciously, swallowing an unwanted startled breath, when he flickers into her vision. Her first words well and truly directed to the second prince – for she's talked and sparred with Thor many a time, but not Loki; never him – are both a threat and a plea, and so it begins.

Loki blinks at her innocently in a way that scrapes along the underside of her skin.

"I think I still may!" She grits out through clenched teeth, an unknown anger slipping through her.

There's something about this boy, this small, dark, wisp of a boy that does things to her calm. He's not open and tangible like the wholeness of Thor; no, he's barely a being at all, and his gossamer appearances in and out of her sight throughout the days make her legs feel heavy and slow.

He drives her mad.

Loki must decide his pointed silence has extended long enough, because he breaks it in an even, calculated tone.

"If you kill me, how will I give you what I have for you?"

"I don't want anything from you." Sif snaps back, and Loki's eyes darken into a different shade of green, one that's cold like blades of grass near frosting season. He swallows once and reassesses.

"Oh but you _do_. This is a rarity only seen by few." He says, his voice quiet and sinewy. "Not even Thor has laid his sights upon it." The bait is fattened further and he looks at her with earnest eyes and a thin mouth.

Sif hesitates and scrutinizes his face warily. His lashes are too long, around much too large of eyes. His face is pretty in a way Sif feels a boy should never be, there's delicacy in the casing of his bones, the slope of his cheek.

She crosses her arms and cocks a narrow hip out, a defiant tilt to her chin. She's taller than him, and when he reaches out for her right wrist and untangles her arms, she has to look down her nose to see his intent.

He opens her stubborn fist and sets something small on the palm of her hand. Sif looks down and feels her eyebrows rise.

Loki has given her a beetle, one unlike any she's ever seen, truly, but a beetle nonetheless. Its back is covered in a dark green shell that shivers with myriad colors as she watches. It's rather lovely she supposes, but it's nothing worth her intrigue.

She arcs a brow and looks up at Loki.

"If this is the height of your ability to gift, then I do not see the excitement or need for it at all." She pauses a breath.

"It's a _beetle_." She says, the word full of disdain in her mouth.

Loki smirks and she wants to wipe it from his face.

"No. It's a Greðian _warrior_ beetle. It is said to have no enemies, for its shell is harder than any other substance known."

Sif rolls her eyes at his self-reverence but feels her curiosity pique despite herself. She turns her hand over and watches as the beetle crawls its way onto her knuckles. Sif opens her mouth to ask him where he found such a thing when she feels a distinct pinch on her skin and sucks in a breath in pain.

"It bit me!" Sif yelps in outrage and shakes her hand madly to fling the thing off, but the beetle clings resolutely to the back of her hand. She feels it prick her skin again and brings her free hand up, enclosed in a fist, to try and crush it.

Loki laughs and she feels a sharp urge to throttle the sound in his thin throat. He cups his hands around the beetle and rescues it from Sif's attempts on its life.

He is smiling, truly smiling, when Sif looks at him, and she almost lunges, but is stopped by the sight of her hand: the flesh of her knuckles welted and red.

Sif grinds her teeth till her jaw smarts. She feels her lip curl in distaste.

"You are awful and unwanted. You, Loki _Odinson_," his name is a curse in her mouth, "are undeserving of the name given you." She spits the last bit out at him and turns angrily to head to the healer's rooms.

She doesn't wait to see the look he wears in response; she doesn't think she wants to see any more of his face.

.

"He gave you a Greðian warrior beetle?" Eir asks, as she wraps Sif's swollen hand, freshly coated in a cooling salve, in linens.

"Very interesting." The woman murmurs when Sif doesn't respond. "I am to understand they are extremely rare, and possess rather...unique properties."

"I would rather have never known it at all!" Sif snaps, and then feels shameful. It is not Eir that she feels anger toward.

"We shall see." Eir responds, and Sif's eyes rise to question her. But the healer says nothing, just declares Sif finished and allowed to go about her day.

.

If in the following years, the following centuries, Sif's knuckles of her dominant hand stand whole and unsplit against blows entirely able to splinter, she thinks nothing of the difference.

If in later years she learns the beetle's venom's ability to fortify whatever substance it penetrates to the levels that bred its name, she says nothing.

She _feels_ nothing.

vii.

"It's not that I don't want to be here, my Prince, but rather that I am uncertain our goal." Volstagg's voice is lined with his respect, and Thor laughs loudly in response.

"We are merely ascertaining the continued state of peace between our realms, my friend; have not worries." He claps a large hand on Volstagg's broad back and Sif smiles at the sight.

Of course, this promise of Thor's has been but a preface to disaster in centuries past, but Sif can't help amending herself to optimism this day. The weather on the satellite colony of one of Alfheim's moons is beyond fair, and she lets the strange violet shade of its atmosphere soak over her skin.

She hears the crunch of rock underfoot, and turns to her left to see Fandral lose footing while eyeing Loki as he noiselessly, but certainly, follows in their wake. Although Loki's been released from his imprisonment, he's yet to be allowed free reign in Asgard, and it's this rule that led to his accompanying their journey on this day: a journey where he is well within Thor's sights.

Sif wonders at times if this sentencing isn't merely a way for Thor to remain in his brother's otherwise unwilling company. The idea saddens her a bit, so she thrusts it from her mind and focuses on their goal, but the specter Loki presents still haunts her thoughts.

The harnessing of enough dark energy to summon them all to this land has left him paler than normal, and she can see a fine play of sweat along the dark hair at his temple.

Sif tugs her train of thinking elsewhere, and is rewarded with a feeling of relief. Thinking about him for too long is an arduous process, as it's trying to reconcile this dark, taciturn thing with anything remotely resembling her once friend.

Thor halts their movements as they near a crumbling, broken remnant of some building, still tucked amongst the dense woods. He holds his hand out as if to block their passing, and he goes quiet and tense as he does before an unanticipated fight.

Sif guards her readiness, and prepares herself; it is good that she does.

Slipping eagerly from the dark protection of the forest are huge, ungainly beasts. Their hides are unlike any she's ever seen: dark, and corded with a muscle that burns under a scaling so heavy it appears leather. Emerging from the animals' protuberant skulls is an array of wild antlers, thickly veined and ringed with a flesh-like mossing.

Her observations are cut short as the beasts snort their displeasure at having their home invaded upon, and make themselves and their ire known.

She barely has thought enough to produce her shield before it's blocking a fearsome ram from one of the animals' horns directed straight for her head. The force of the blow pushes her back, and she turns her heels into the ground to gain her bearings.

Around her, Hogun's mace has embedded itself uselessly in the back of one of the beasts, and she watches as Fandral comes to the aid of his friend as he tries to pry his weapon from the impenetrable skin. Fandral's sword makes neat work of the animal's exposed underbelly: the clear and seemingly singular source of weakness it possesses, and Sif watches, satisfied, as it drops to the ground.

Volstagg's axe is working its way through the limbs of the two beasts surrounding he and Thor, who is, in turn, propelling Mjölnir with a ferocity that reignites the fight in her blood.

Sif is shielding repeated attempts the animal makes on her, and she finds purchase and a moment's respite behind a thick tree. The beast stalks toward her slowly, in a way that makes her feel decidedly hunted, and Sif gnashes her teeth, for she so hates when the tables have been turned.

She scans the area before her with fresh eyes, and sees Loki standing outside of the entirety of the efforts. His palms hang open at his sides, and his stance is relaxed, if a bit odd. Anger boils behind the words she levies to aim at him, and she wonders at the fact that she'd ever considered him something halfway worthwhile; curses the time she's spent angry, but undecided, in her regard for him.

"How very like you!" She spits, stepping out from behind her shadowed alcove and turning to him. "Standing here a coward, when a fight wears on around you! A pathetic feat that you won't even come to the aid of your own _brother_."

Loki's eyes find hers, and there's something sadistic in their color, the shape of his brow.

Sif wonders if he is so full of poison that he has forgotten how to love. She wonders if he ever really knew how to at all.

"It's a good thing I haven't one then." Loki replies and goes back to his idleness, detachment writ clear on his face.

Sif has half a mind to strike him down herself, but her attention is quickly overtaken by the reanimation of her earlier abandoned fight, which the animal has reminded her of tenfold.

For her inattentiveness she is paid in kind: the beast's antler's knock her grip from her shield, and it clatters to the hard-packed soil with a sound that she feels in her bones. She turns her back to it, and skirts to the left with a motion that rolls through her knees. Sif fingers the sword at her shoulder and pulls to relieve it from its confines.

But before she can fully remove it, the animal rams itself into her side, and she pitches forward onto her knees. The huge thing rears up on its hind legs and she is about to cry out from frustration, when the beast keens loudly and falls away from her and onto its side; from where Sif can see a dagger – shimmering in an out of place coating of ice –lodged well inside of its heart.

She casts her gaze up and, strangely enough, to Loki, who has blood leaking from his nose and a look of surprise washing over his features in the moment it takes him to recollect himself and close off.

Sif hears a triumphant cry from Volstagg and a deep laugh from Thor, and she knows the fight is over, but her attention is stuck entirely on the frost-bred blade, and the shade of Loki's blood as it makes a graceful line to his mouth.

He does not reach up to wipe it away; she cannot say why her fingers so itch.

iii.

When Sif is but a girl nearing a woman, the skin peels savagely from her knee during a particularly hard spar with Thor. She grins like a wolf and tells all who listen, as they sit under a tree to catch their breath, how proudly she will bear her mark: the true brand of a warrior.

Loki is out with them this day, a less and less common occurrence, and his eyes flash coolly at her from under heavy lashes in the heat of the afternoon sun that is brilliant upon her skin. He is long-limbed and still reed thin, and she feels a spark of heat (anger she swears) under his gaze. Sif leans back on her hands and watches his mouth dip down as his eyes flicker to the blood weeping brightly down the line of her shin.

She balks as he reaches out, unbidden and unannounced, and touches her torn skin, his long fingers quicksilver fast. He presses once and drags his thumb quickly up the side of her knee, and – so clever is he – her skin closes in on itself; the angry wound now soft, pink skin.

Sif rounds on him as he smirks, and she revels in the anger in her blood, while the nerves of her flesh burn in his fingers' wake. She lunges at him and hisses through her teeth how the branding of such a mark shows courage, and sets the owner as one to be revered.

"I would be respected!" She shrieks in his face as he skirts just outside of her reach. "I would be loved! Not like you, a true _coward_."

The last word is spat as she swings a fist, sloppy in her fury, too wide of the underside of his chin.

Loki says nothing as he stands quickly from the grass and walks away: away from Sif, away from her vengeful hands.

Days later, when she finds him alone, she splits the skin of his cheek – so very fine-boned – in revenge.

Loki wears his wound high on his skin, angry and raw, until it closes on its own.

Sif says nothing.

ix.

Sif has all but put out of her mind thoughts of ill-placed wasteland weaponry and any ideas given to its origin; the believed source is too fresh a sore to be scratched at.

She instead turns her energy anew to her training, and it is after a particularly grueling afternoon of putting her friends through their exhaustion, that she finds herself surrounded by the sounds of talking and the scrape of cutlery against dining ware.

Around her at the table, Thor and the Warriors Three are immersed in a discussion regarding Jötunheim and its inhabitants that leaves Thor looking darker and darker with each sentence. She sees his eyes stray to the empty chair at his side, the one across from her, and there is a sudden nip in her throat.

She means to ask him after the evening's feast has ended why such talk puts a cloud in his eye; she means to tease him for growing soft, but she is never afforded the chance, for Thor beats her at her own game, and speaks his mind at once: open and honest, and strangely subdued in the company of his friends.

"We should have care how we speak ill." He says, stabbing his knife into his meat and pushing his plate from his sight.

Volstagg's voice is loud in his humor as he reaches for Thor's deserted food.

"And why should we care so for a litter of savages?" He asks, spearing his pilfered flesh.

Thor is quiet a beat long enough that Sif knows something is amiss; she hardens her fingers around the stem of her cup in waiting for his response. But it matters not, she could pour steel into her bones, and still never have been readied enough for the words that spill from Thor's mouth.

"Loki calls the Jötuns blood." He swallows after the word as if it's malformed in his mouth. "His _true_ blood." Thor finishes and drags his eyes up to meet those of his friends, who sit wide-eyed and suspended in a state of motionless disbelief.

Sif is the first to move; Sif is always the first to move.

She removes her fingers from her cup, lets her chair scrape the floor as she pushes back from the table and turns to head to the training yard for the second time in less than half a candle's life.

Upon her arrival she moves through her forms with flourish, until the sweat seeps into her stinging eyes.

She stays well past the setting of the sun. She stays till her lungs seize in the cage of her chest, and her heart thrums against all the cracks she swears aren't suffering for a traitor.

viii.

One afternoon, long after his return to Asgard, and shortly after Sif had started to allow herself to believe he may actually find roots to settle the dissonance of his mind, they receive word that Loki has disappeared. Sif bites her tongue against her disappointment, and polishes her blade in ready.

Frigga wrings her hands with white knuckles, and Thor bellows down the emptied halls.

Two weeks pass and Thor's anger settles into the sadness that's Sif's learning to associate with his brother. There is panic and chaos within Asgard, as it holds a collected breath poised to befall the whims of the second prince.

_Mad_, they call him, and Sif has to restrain herself against all the excuses to aid him that come unwanted to her tongue.

The fear overtakes the looks of hatred on the faces of the people, and Sif prepares herself for the things that will come.

But nothing does.

When he returns, it is unexpected. She, Thor, and the Warriors Three are crowded in the Gold Room, and with nothing more than a flash of energy, Loki is there.

He is crouched low on his knees in a weakened stance, curled heavily in on himself. His hair hangs in his eyes and when he lifts his face to the room, it is bloodied, broken, and a lock of lank, dark hair sticks to an open cut above his eye.

Sif doesn't even wait for him to speak (not that he even would, his silence has stretched for much too long) before she turns on her heel and stalks from the room.

She thinks she can feel his gaze on the valleys between the ridges of her spine.

x.

Sif is alone in the training yard, as her companions have since left to retire, when she feels a presence root itself behind her. She spins and finds herself face to face with Loki, and she eyes him once, quickly and unabashedly, before she returns to her work.

"Strange, your being here." He remarks after a lengthy moment, coolly and without aim, as if commenting on a plate of fruit set out for feast. Sif sighs and falls to his lure.

"And where else would I be?" She asks, not bothering to look in his direction.

"Thor and his…troops battle on Midgard; it is a wonder they do not ask one with your skills to join." He replies, and Sif stops her movements, for she cannot begin to guess his purpose or assertion.

"I was unneeded." Sif counters with a sniff, not allowing herself further investigation into his motives. Loki makes a sound in the back of his throat that Sif associates with agreement, and then goes silent yet again.

It's strange, her acclimatizing herself to his silences. There are sounds that live in the creases and hollows between his words – as few and far between as they have become – and her ear is trained to them like a symphony.

She centers Loki in the corner of her vision, and turns fully as she watches him drag the tip of a finger along the edge of one of the small, lithe blades he's produced from his person.

"Should I be in fear?" She asks him pointedly, her eyes focused on the path his finger makes on the mean, fine edge of the dagger. It is a jest, but it is a poor one, surely, for his eyes shadow and his mouth tightens.

She won't let herself regret it.

Loki does not answer her, so she collects the hair fallen from its restraint at the nape of her neck and reties her knot. She turns to leave, and is at the edge of the yard when Loki's voice bathes the thick of the silence.

"I would tell you I feel sorrow if I thought you'd spend even a half-second believing me." It's a quiet tone, and one that makes her still. There is no packaging, no dryness wrapping around the bends in the pitch, and Sif ventures she knows the truth for how it sounds.

To her surprise the response she feeds him is one she didn't even know she'd been thinking.

"Where did you go?" She pauses in wonder at the question she has formed and then finishes her thought. "When you left, this last time. Where did you go?"

She envisions his face with bruises tugging at the undersides of his eyes. She sees, in her mind, the unguarded, exhausted position his body had made crouched against the floor of the Gold Room of the palace.

Loki looks at her as she walks nearer to him, and his brows pull in toward one another as he tries to weigh her words and their meaning; she watches the line of his throat as he swallows.

"Svartálfaheim." He says. It is quiet and crisp; Sif pulls in air through her teeth.

"Why?" She asks, and finds herself wary of his answer.

He doesn't respond for a time, and Sif feels impatience burn her skull.

"I will have an answer, even if you cannot afford honesty." She says, and Loki passes a hand over his eyes in an uncharacteristic display of weariness.

"I had come to understand they are familiar with the mechanisms of the Bifröst." Loki speaks with his face directed downward, his eyes trained on the dust at their feet.

"Why?" She parrots her previous question, quicker now and pointed to dig.

"I was at an impasse." He says, and pulls his gaze to hers; Sif is startled to find his look is earnest.

She blinks and looks away, and immediately feels weak.

"I was unaware you were looking for a solution." She says to cover her embarrassment, and Loki speaks with a smirk in his voice.

"Yes, well, purgatory is easier moved than destroyed."

She looks to him again, and feels a warmth – foreign and broad – flower in her chest. The expression he wears is ingrained in her memory as far back as she remembers, and it smarts with a longing that pulls at her. For, as hard and as often as she's tried to replace the quick, clever boy with the vacant, wretched man they say he has become, all the attempts she has made have been futile; it's a resounding empty threat.

"I see." She finally responds, and Loki's smirk stretches a bit further. "I did not realize you worried yourself with such things." She continues, humor settled snugly into her tone.

"Tell no one." He says, and pauses a beat. "It is rather treasonous against my affliction of apathy."

Sif feels a grin on her mouth, and lets it spread. This air between them, full of his past transgressions and her past anger, is stifled but breathing still. It's like a flesh-wound that's settled into something deeper; something that's lost the white-hot slash of betrayal and blossomed into an age-old ache that sits hollowly just inside her ribcage.

She lets her smile fuel her words, and her reply is softened in turn.

"We wouldn't want that."

"No." he says, "We wouldn't want that."

Loki laughs at the end of his words, and Sif reaches out and, almost entirely against her will, sets her fingers to his bottom lip, which is still parted and curled up to frame the sound in his mouth. She finds she wants to touch it: his laugh; she wants to cup it in her palm and see if it feels as fragile as it sounds.

As soon as she places her fingers to his mouth, he freezes – clover-eyed – and she pulls back, the open, genial mood evaporating from the air.

Sif feels oddly bared and brittle, so she rushes from the grounds without so much as a word.

xi.

Sif feels often – turning time in on itself like an inelegant fold – she would be better if she only knew how.

She would chase from her vision any run-ins with thieves who wear their hair dark and too long. She would rid herself of ideas to cut from him, this thief, the length of his hair that declares him a stranger; she would banish the thought of refitting him to the one that she knows.

But she feels oftener that this fabled agenda might be treacherous, and Sif has never been anything but loyal, so she avoids shadows in the halls, and surrounds herself with light.

xii.

She finds Loki with a book in his palm, leaned against a shelf in the library; she doesn't even realize she'd been looking for him.

She lets herself take in Loki's appearance: his being in this room, his absorption with a book, behavior so very like his days as a boy, such a foreign being to her now; Sif is startled with the nostalgia that coats her breaths.

But he's changed, and in ways even further than the ones the recent wayward years have cut from him. His legs are long and crossed at the ankles, and the fingers he has braced lightly against the page are tapered with a grace she'll never understand. His face is shadowed with the corner he's chosen as his own, but she knows the movements of his eyelashes against the ridge of his cheek, she can feel them against the grain of her bones.

His head raises the slightest bit in acknowledgment of her presence and she can sense the tension of his muscles, as they contract with the movement, as if it is mirrored in her own.

There's something licking at the inside of her gut, heating her to her toes and Sif swallows to moisten the sudden dryness of her throat as Loki stands and closes the book slowly.

She feels a chasm split her breathing apart, and there are things rolling like horses with iron hooves inside of her brain; she thinks she can feel them seeping through her skin – these unanswerable things – and tangling in her hair.

Sif unbinds her stance and watches Loki walk toward her with a silent tread.

His eyes question her even when his mouth will not, and she hates that she can feel each syllable of his insufferable silence, lined out as though he's set pen to parchment. But Sif can't quite read him, she's illiterate to his hand, and she wonders briefly and clumsily if she's ever quite been able to.

There are too many things he is asking, and too many answers she knows not, but they are all present in her retinue: these sleepy-eyed indiscretions that are well-oiled and folded into the pockets of her consciousness. Sif's knuckle pops against the fist she's made of her hands, and this whole thing beating heavily within her is entirely a mess.

She exhales and catches the green of Loki's eye as his gaze loosens, and it's a brand of fear, an entirely simple and predictable fear, that she breathes out.

"I can't." Sif says suddenly and then, contrarily, directly surges forward and fists her fingers savagely in his tunic.

She rises on her toes to envelop the difference between them and presses her mouth to his with a force that worries everything inside of her.

His mouth is soft but immobile, so she presses harder and moves hers to coax his, to plead. Sif aligns all the angles of her body with his, and pushes against him angrily.

Loki is completely stiff and unmoving and she feels something raw open inside of her ribcage. Everything is edged and jagged where it should be smooth and stable, so she runs her tongue along Loki's lower lip to break him open and scatter him as unevenly as she.

Finally – _finally_ – Loki's mouth opens to hers, and his hands sink artful and fast into her hair, and he curls his long, elegant fingers against her skull to pull her toward him at a better angle.

Things shift densely in the space of her sternum and she almost lets out the sound building in the back of her throat, but Loki's hands slide from her hair to her shoulders and he pushes himself back and off of her with a ferocity that jostles her.

Sif blinks strangely – slow and open – and reaches for him again, but Loki, ever graceful, ever sure-footed, steps outside of her grasp, so Sif stops herself and looks at him.

His brows are drawn together in a dark, ragged line and his eyes are blown wide and wild.

"What is this Sif?" He asks her, loosing a mirthless laugh through the words; it makes the hairs on her nape rise. "I didn't realize games were befitting to the esteem of war."

He says it in a fast, sickly way that is remarkably different than the cool, paced design Loki normally chooses his words. The rhythm affects her almost more than the words themselves, and it stalls her response: the one she isn't quite certain she even has, because she's too busy trying to understand how his wet mouth, curving around even, blunt teeth and barbed words, makes her fingers ache.

"Ah, but yes, you must sink to levels mirrored by the enemy." He answers his own question and laughs colorlessly again. Sif feels herself stirred into action at the inaccuracy of his accusations and the smirk on his lips.

"Loki -"

"No. I will not be a bargain for a _beggar_." He says in a way that sounds like a gasp, the last words poisonous on his tongue, and his hands splaying, his eyelashes fluttering.

Sif feels anger and shame heat her tongue, but the shadows swallow Loki's form and he's gone before she finds her words wholly, before she's even sure of her intent. She swallows heavily again and the taste of him is hollow, yet present, in her mouth.

The walls of the library feel too loud with their stone, so she elects to leave, and her tread isn't quite silent, but she doesn't quite care.

xiii.

There's an emptiness that comes from a silence when it's plucked from rotation.

Words lost are but one thing, sounds lost are entirely another.

A new silence will bud in place of the former, and it is formed wide and reaching; and it sucks in everything in its path like a void, until skin stretches too tightly over bones, and ears ring for the things they are missing.

Sif knows this like she knows the shape the veins make on the back of her hand.

xiv.

The Avengers – as Sif has long since learned they are to be called; she has long since been acquainted with these people, these _heroes_ – are fighting the Titanian force known as Thanos.

The being is powerful and smart and precisely intentioned; and when he summons an unknown hostile energy to materialize himself in Asgard in search of the tesseract – for there are always those looking for the cube, straining the boundaries of its captivity in Odin's halls – Loki unleashes himself, and blinks from sight before Sif even has moments full enough to comprehend the madness around her.

The Warriors Three arm themselves heartily: Sif's glaive is already heavy in her hand as she rises on her haunches in deference to the battle lurking in the malevolence of the creature's eyes.

"Do not waste your time." He tells them, and Sif bites her lip to draw blood as she sinks her teeth against the blackened awe that has risen in her from the sight of Fandral's sword being removed from his grasp of a power not his own.

The invader's voice is long and wide, and Sif seeks to cut it from his throat; but before she moves into her truest and readied form, Loki returns with Thor, mere minutes after his departure, and he stands with his brother, tight-jawed and steel-eyed, in the company of the mixed band of Midgardian fighters Thor has so accustomed himself with.

Sif barely has time to register the wane pallor of Loki's skin, or the shock she harvests in response to his succeeding in such a tasking feat, before everything erupts.

This is pandemonium; it is chaos in its purest form, and Sif grins savagely as the battle sings in her veins.

The Iron Man rises like a bird into the sky over Thanos's head, and shoots a weapon foreign to Sif down at his skull. But Thanos just bats him away as he would a mere nuisance, and Sif's fingers burn with stress and restlessness as a handful of beings akin to Thanos actualize into existence around the Titanian like a band; a cornucopia of violence in synchrony.

This Sif can pick apart, this she can fight. So she sets to work on prying the life from one of the creatures' unfamiliar bones, her glaive sharp and consistent in the swing of her grip.

She provokes it into anger, and the focus it had spent on the weapon-less Fandral is redirected her readied way. It charges, and she ducks and swivels fluidly outside of its course.

She feels the muscles of her legs bunch in anticipation as she rounds back in on herself, thrusting her glaive outward with all the intent of war.

To her right, she can see Thor busying himself with finding Mjölnir a sure path to the antipathy of the trespassers. Past him, the woman known as the Black Widow embroils herself alongside the arrowed marksman, and as one, they fight a few of Thanos's army.

Sif's attention fully reins in on her task, and it's a relief when her Titanian foe swings heavily on her, for she uses the thick limb as leverage to propel herself onto its back and sink her glaive into the soft part exposed at the side of its neck. She rolls outside of its trajectory as the heavy, dead body falls to the ground, and frees her weapon from its carcass in one flowing motion.

Around her, more and more of the beings begin to fall prey to the merits of the Midgardian team. She rounds on the field to take in the sights, observing and storing information imperative to her needs, and sees her fellow warriors – her friends – loud and able, defending their realm with all that makes her proud.

Thor has just felled his opponent, and has turned his might to the aid of his brother and the great green entity known as the Hulk; who are, for once, fighting the same force. Thanos is shifting in and out of focus, and Sif almost grins as she watches Loki duplicate and match the beast's feints with his own. The Hulk slams a monstrous fist into the sensitive part of Thanos's gut, and Sif is rewarded with the sight of the being's lost breath.

Sif spins on her heel in satisfaction and treks to the aid of the soldier in red and blue, as he is knocked sideways by a particularly large Titanian fighter. She focuses on distraction, and arcs her glaive to a side projection, knocking the beast squarely on its large head. He rounds on her, and she smiles, until she feels her blade knocked from her grasp and is uprooted.

Sif ducks into a crouch as the soldier, having regained his footing, brings his glinting shield down about the Titanian's turned head, its cavernous jaws hanging open in a fighter's cry. She wrenches her weapon back into her own control and it finds a liquid purchase in the flesh of the beast's bared mouth. She frees her glaive with an appeased tug, and watches as its dark blood coats her boots.

There is the feeling of victory hanging heavy in the air with the death, and Sif lets it collect on her teeth. She can hear the noises of battle whir on about her, and turns back once again to the central source.

The Man of Iron and Thor work in cohesion against Thanos who is giving as good as his worth. She sees the Iron Man disengage himself momentarily to aid the Hulk, who has been burdened with two of the Titanians.

Sif surges forward when Thor is thrown from his feet by Thanos, who is ruthlessly swinging Fandral's abducted sword – incased in an unnatural, glowing blue from tip to hilt – over his head. She feels her pace quicken at the sight, but is blocked from her destination by the appearance of Loki, in multitudinous duplications of himself, ringing around Thanos with continually increasing numbers. Sif stops to collect herself, and trains her eyes to look past the façade into the truth of his presence.

But she barely has time to attempt to count before the illusion evaporates and standing opposite Thanos is Loki, corporeal and singular, with his shoulders lined in a heady, transparent blue. Sif stills and watches in horror as the Titanian pulls Fandral's sword back from the home it's made in the center of Loki's chest.

He falls to his knees in a graceless drop, and Sif hears a sound that stops the battle bloom foully against the noises of disrepair. Before she can even move, Thor has already hurled Mjölnir toward Thanos's head, and the Hulk rages toward the foreign beast in unison.

She sees Thanos vanish again, entirely and completely this time, and she sees Thor fall to his brother's side, horror and fear a duet on his face.

The fighting stops as the surviving Titans follow their leader to realms unknown, and as the rest of the Midgardians and Asgardians, bloody and wearied, turn to the scene with unease.

Everything moves like the sap of trees in winter, and yet Sif is aware of only two things:

The shape of Loki's long fingers as they arc and press against his chest, and the feel of fear, true and crowded, in the beat of her staggered breathing.

She doesn't realize till after the fight has left and Thor's carried his brother off to Eir's rooms, that the sound that had pierced the battlefield had been bred from her own lungs.

xv.

Sif dreams.

She dreams she splits Loki's skull and spills out the lies he calls reasons; strips them bare-boned and makes him _see_.

She dreams all the soil has turned to sky, and the rest of the days are lived too bright and narrow, inside a glass-walled box drenched in a green she thinks knows the shade of.

She dreams Loki's steps glow and she tracks them as she would a hunted rabbit. She dreams he licks blood from her wrist and she wakes to salt in her mouth.

xvi.

Sif realizes, days after the battle with Thanos, and after Loki's been restored from an uncertain future, that she knows the exact amount of time it has been – down to the small, fragile units of measure –since Loki has last talked to her; really talked to her, in a conversation directed and intended for her ears, and split apart by her own mind and responses.

The number lives wide-eyed behind the fear that hasn't quite dissipated from her vision, from her fragmented thoughts. It tugs at her tongue, and breeds questions and ideas in her mind. She shapes and reshapes her pattern of understanding, till she grows weary with the motion of producing things she believes she may already know. For she can map it out in many different pretty ways, but it's the ugly ones – the raw ones – she likes best; they leave more scars.

So she sets her feet, one foot in front of the other, and finds her path leading to Loki's rooms, and for once, she does not fight it.

When she enters, she stops in her tracks, and soaks in the vision presented her with her fingers curled. Loki stands bared from the waist up, with fresh linens wrapped around his chest. He is all flat planes and sharp angles, and he is expansive and tangible, in bright, unwavering life.

She sucks in a breath and urges herself forward.

When he sees her, he is wide-eyed and vulnerable in a pale imitation of confidence.

Sif steps nearer to him and raises her fingers – uncurling them at last – to his chest. She thinks she can feel the mended skin as it once was: flayed and traitorous, and much too thin. Sif's fingers press gently to the wound and Loki sucks in a breath in trade. She feels the air expand in his lungs, and wishes she could trace the path it makes in the spaces between his bones; the space where she would pull a lie from his ribs, and give him the truth in its place.

He says nothing as she bends and puts her mouth to his collarbone, her tongue on his flesh an apology.

"Loki." She speaks into his skin, and she feels the muscles beneath shudder in response. She raises her eyes to meet his gaze: so wounded, so frightened.

She would see that look gone from his eyes for the rest of her days.

She places her fingertips on the elegant line of his jaw and fits her thumb to his pulse point, hot and thready in the cool, pale column of his throat.

Sif swallows.

"Touch me." She commands him.

And so he does.

i.

The first time Sif meets the princes two she is cross but intrigued, even with all of her previous decisions not to be.

It had been raining that morning, and now her dress sticks to her legs with the mud she's trekked through; and although Sif loves the feeling, it makes Mother purse her mouth and eye her with a distinct gaze.

So Sif puts out thoughts of her mother, and instead turns her attention to the two boys – for that is all they are, and hardly even that – standing with their mother, the queen, on the steps of the palace.

One is quick to come to her ear, talkative and golden-haired, and his steps are rough and his laughs are loud. He tells her of his training for battle before he even remembers her name. And when he says his name in trade, he quite bellows it, which in turn makes Sif roll her eyes and smile.

The other is cool and reserved and, Sif thinks, quite odd. He's taller than the other, but is so thin Sif has half a mind to blow air out of her mouth just to see that he may topple over. His mouth is turned downward and his hands are folded in front of him as if he were at some great ceremony. It irks her; she wants to tangle his hands with her own, so that he loses his disregarding air.

Loki, as she learns he is called, is quiet-voiced in his greetings, and sharp in his looks. He only smiles once, when Thor whispers some jest for only his brother's ear – which earns them both stern words from their mother – and even then it is a pitiable, half-formed thing.

Sif hopes, in the future, when these grounds become hers to explore as she pleases, and these princes hers to call companions, that she never has to bend her friendship to the younger, with all his green eyes and smart mouth.

Sif feels she will probably never like him.

He makes her ribs itch.

0.


End file.
